Possessor review, Culture Whisper (LFF 2020)
Ever had those moments and days when you don’t feel yourself? Well, rest assured, you might not be going crazy. It’s probably just a body-shifting assassin framing you for murder. Such is the conceit for the surreal hitman thriller Possessor, written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg, son of the cult filmmaker David Cronenberg.
Like a Freudian nightmare, the son will be inevitably pitted against the father. David Cronenberg beautifully mutilated reality and politics in films like Videodrome, Shivers and The Fly back in the 70s and 80s – becoming the champion of ‘body-horror’ cinema. Brandon follows his example, indulging in a similar volume of violence that causes over-reactive viewers to flee the cinema.
But unlike David, who doesn’t usually like to feel things unless they’re bursting out of flesh, Brandon reins in the politics in favour of the characters affected by them.
